Go Fix It!
Solving the Urban 'Food Desert' Problem via Arabbing Image by "Patapsco Jones" of changebaltimore.blogspot.com Introduction
Baltimore's Office of Promotion and Arts recently hosted an online forum where interested citizens could submit proposals to solve the city's enormous "missing tooth" (vacant lots) problem. Some of the proposals were unfortunately quite specious, especially those which called for more "green space." However, one of the most intelligent proposals for the Baltimore Infill Survey was an elegant strategy to solve several of the city's problems at once: (1) How can we fill in Baltimore's missing teeth with useful and productive activities? (2) How can we solve Baltimore's daunting 'food desert' problem? and (3) How can we promote self-sustaining, local networks of distribution and commerce? The proposal above sought to solve these problems by filling missing teeth with locally-maintained vertical gardens and using the existing Baltimore network of arabbers to distribute the produce to neighborhoods all over town.
There are, however, obstacles to implementing this strategy. (1) The arabbing profession needs to be freed from the grips of burdensome regulation and animal rights hysteria, (2) the city needs to implement a new "Dollar Homes" program to encourage entrepreneurs to set up urban gardening outfits, (3) new stables need to be built and rented to interested arabbers in a transparent manner, and (4) the manner in which we implement and update government regulations needs to be rethought, not just in Baltimore but nation-wide. Below are descriptions of the obstacles to implementing the solution proposed above followed by a description of a comprehensive vision to implement the proposal if the obstacles can be overcome.
The decline of arabbing in Baltimore
"Arabbers" are merchants who use horse-pulled carts to sell produce, seafood, and various other foods to urban residents. In times past they also supplied ice, coal, wood, scrap metal, milk and other dairy products, etc, to residential neighborhoods. Before the advent of the automobile, many US cities contained horsecart merchants since they were a very convenient and reliable way to obtain fresh produce, especially in areas that were distant from grocery stores and wholesalers' food markets. Baltimore is the only city in the US where the arabbing profession still exists, but even in Baltimore the profession has been on the decline since WWII, and it has been flirting with extinction in the last few decades.
Some of the reasons behind the decline of the arabbing profession in Baltimore are obvious and not at all surprising: The rise of fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and large suburban supermarkets has led to a lifestyle where most households now tend to buy their groceries from large supermarkets on a weekly (or even monthly) basis rather than shopping at local grocery stores or public markets on a daily basis (as was common before WWII and is still common in Europe, Latin America, Asia, etc).
Baltimore still has busy port facilities and six public markets (Avenue Market, Lexington Market, Broadway Market, Cross Street Market, Northeast Market, and Hollins Market), which may explain why the arabbing profession has survived in Baltimore but has gone extinct elsewhere: it is still somewhat easy (but becoming perennially more difficult) for arabbers in Baltimore to obtain produce and other goods via wholesale at the public markets and docks and to resell the produce in residential neighborhoods that are isolated from those public markets or supermarkets. Despite the presence of wholesaling activities at the docks and public markets, large swaths of the city are still "food deserts" (discussed in greater detail in the next section).
Selling produce via horsecarts in an urban setting obviously requires shelter and facilities for the horses. In the past this was partially accomplished via public stables - just as contemporary cities provide automobile parking to commuters via public parking garages (and use parking fees to pay for the maintenance of the garages), so too did cities rent out stalls in public stables to individuals who needed a place to keep their horses. Many individuals who relied on the public stables did so because (1) they did not have enough space (land) to build their own private stables or (2) they could not afford to build, run, and maintain their own private stables.
Out of sheer necessity, Baltimore once had some 65 public stables (p79). This number had dwindled to some 50 stables by the 1940s, and by the 1990s they had dwindled to just three. One of the three stables (the Retreat Street stable) was recently condemned as well. The horses from Retreat Street were moved to temporary tent stables under a highway overpass on Monroe Street, and it was here that several cases of abuse/neglect emerged (not at all surprising considering the shoddy facilities the arabbers had to work with). Baltimore simply has not taken the organizational efficiency with which it operates public parking garages and applied that same strategy to the public stables: the city could have run the stables as for-profit shelters (rented horse stalls) to fund building maintenance - the practice of renting stable stalls lapsed after the number of public stables in the city declined to an insignificant amount. The city did not pay for horse feed and medical treatment until the recent accusations of neglect/abuse: Arabbers are appropriately expected to make their own provisions to feed and care for the horses, and in the past they often employed young volunteers to do those very tasks. Here it becomes obvious that a heavy, burdensome layer of well-meaning but misguided regulation has stifled the ease with which arabbers could once care for their horses:
"The city laws have changed. While young people used to be stable hands, they can't anymore. You have to be 18 or older to handle horses [My note: But you only have to be 16 to drive a car!?], you have to have a license, animal inspectors come in regularly to check the stables. It's not the same. Traditions are passed down generation to generation, but if young people can't handle horses, it's stopping them from joining the trade (Roland Freeman)."
Since the public stables have been allowed to decay, it is not surprising that - as arabbers have resorted to sheltering their horses in makeshift facilities - abuse and neglect would inevitably emerge and that the city, through sheer negligence, would be forced to pay close to $500,000 to remedy the deteriorating conditions it itself fostered. As the article in the above link pointed out, it would have been cheaper for the city to build new stables than to allow the situation to deteriorate and pay for the inevitable (and usually more expensive) cleanaup afterward - such is the inevitable outcome of deferred maintenance.
Besides the wanton neglect of stables and curtailing of youth volunteerism, the city has established numerous other regulations to control the arabbing profession. As in most other American cities, there is strong public pressure to remove slow moving objects (bikes, pedestrians, horses) from the roadways to make automobile travel as convenient and efficient as possible. As in any other city, Baltimore's planning and regulatory agencies are hostage to the hyperspecialized demands of traffic engineers and transportation planners who tend to be more interested in automobile efficiency (using more curb cuts, using wider curve ratios, and narrowing sidewalks to make automobile travel easier) than in intermodal transport (making street networks convenient and accessible to forms of transport other than the car). The city has restricted the locations where arabbers may hawk their products - the Inner Harbor and other large swaths of the city are off-limits. The city has also restricted the times of day that arabbers may operate - regulations require the horses to be back in their stables by dusk. Arabbers argue that this cuts them off from a lucrative business opportunity - many commuters, returning home after a long workday, could have a perfect opportunity to purchase groceries in their own neighborhoods right before dinner:
"Dorothy Johns says the vendors in her family are just breaking even these days. She hopes it will get better as the season progresses, and blames poor sales on city regulations that limit the hours the horses can be out on the street. The rules prohibit arabbers from operating when the weather is particularly hot or cold, and when there is snow, ice, or excessive rain. From the last Sunday in October through the first Sunday in April, the horses must be in by dusk. That is often before their customers are home from work, Jones says (Link)."
Burdensome regulation is not the only problem. Hysterical animal rights activists have also militated for the removal of the horses. As Scott Bullock describes so well:
"The decline of arabbing began in 1966 when the City made it virtually impossible to construct any new stables within its limits. Around the same time, government urban renewal projects closed some of the remaining stables as well as the City's wholesale produce market in the Inner Harbor, which made it much more difficult for arabbers to conveniently obtain their stock.
"The arabbing tradition struggled along, however, until the arabbers faced a larger and far more politically powerful adversary: animal-rights activists from the suburbs who are philosophically opposed to the use of horses for trade, especially in a city environment.
"To fight efforts that would heavily regulate and eventually prohibit arabbing, the Arabber Preservation Society (APS) was formed in January 1994. The Society - which had restored some older stables and raised funds to preserve arabbing - swung into action against Bill 753, which, among other things, would have sharply limited the number of arabber licenses issued each year. Most members of the community, while acknowledging problems with how the animals were cared for in some of the stables, recognized that arabbing is a vital entrepreneurial tradition worthy of preservation. Because of the efforts of APS and others, Bill 753 eventually went down in defeat.
"The regulations and harassment of the arabbers have taken their toll. Only about 40 arabber licenses are currently issued. Meanwhile, pressure from the animal-rights activists continues. According to Steven Blake, a carpenter by trade and president of APS, new regulations have been pending for more than a year. The regulations, pushed by the animal-rights activists, would not need City Council approval and instead could be implemented by the City's Health Commissioner. Among other things, the regulations would establish a detailed and stringent temperature/humidity index that would curtail the ability of arabbers to work. For instance, according to Blake, the temperature could be 75 degrees with light rain (but high humidity), and the horses could not be taken out.
"The racial dimensions to this struggle have not been lost on the community - especially the arabbers. While almost all of the arabbers are older, African-American men from the inner-city trying to eke out a living, the animal-rights activists are uniformly well-educated, white suburbanites on an ideological crusade. Moreover, what the activists ignore is that the arabbers themselves are "horse-crazy" and often choose arabbing as an occupation or do it in their spare time so that they can be around horses.
"For the grand tradition of arabbing to be preserved, regulations that go beyond reasonably protecting the safety of the horses must be defeated. Indeed, the City should encourage the expansion of this dynamic remnant of Baltimore's splendid history of neighborhood enterprise. Unlike most historic preservation efforts, the arabbers do not rely on government subsidies or regulation to preserve their tradition. Rather, the arabbers only ask that the government limit its role to reasonable regulation of the horses and stables and allow them to continue in the occupation many of them learned from their fathers or grandfathers (Bullock)."
The militant and obsessive animal rights activists (they seem to care so much for the welfare of a few horses but they ignore inner city children who suffer from the same neglect, abuse, malnourishment, etc - which comes first - people or horses?) explicitly told the New York Times and the Baltimore City Paper that their ultimate goal is to eradicate the arabbing profession at all costs:
"Animal welfare advocates have been trying to get the arabbers off the streets for years. In 1995, a year after several horses froze to death, an animal rights activist told The New York Times: "The only thing we're willing to negotiate is when will they go out of business - five years, four years?"... Van Allen says HSUS [the Humane Society of the United States] has "an agenda to get horses off city streets." HSUS' Stacy Segal acknowledges that is essentially true. "In this day and age, we believe that horses do not belong on city streets," she says. [My note: Why doesn't she then militate against horses pulling visitors around in the touristy parts of town?] But, she contends, in working with the city of Baltimore, HSUS was simply looking for "certain standards of care." "We're definitely not on a mission to get rid of the arabbers," she says (Link)."
As described in the excerpts above, Baltimore is suffering from a scenario where outsiders are trying to control what the city's residents can do with their horses. While certain standards of care are certainly necessary in order to avoid willful cruelty to animals, any attempt to dictate what people can and cannot do with their horses (the HSUS implies that horses are just fine for rural/suburban recreation but that they should not be used for urban labor) is outrageous and must be fought. Furthermore, although it may sound odd to suggest it now, it might be possible that, just as we will need to become more reliant on renewable energy systems in the future, so too might we once again need to increase our reliance on extensive animal (and human) labor, especially if we don't get our act together on renewable energy resources and we are shoehorned into a scenario where we have put off renewable energy for so long that it is "too late" and we are forced to return to animal labor/transport when oil becomes scarce. If such a scenario occurs, urbanist James Howard Kunstler argues that a certain amount of both willful cruelty and unintended negligence of animals is to be expected (00:07:10), as such abuse was very common before the automobile era.
Individuals who oppose the use of horses for arabbing have asked why the tradition needs to be preserved - wouldn't it be easier to give arabbers trucks and vans to distribute their produce? Indeed a group led Jim Kucher of the University of Baltimore came to the conclusion that the arabbing profession was inefficient because the horses were "too slow":
"Late last year, Jim Kucher, executive director of Entrepreneurship Programs at the University of Baltimore, and a group of his students - a chapter of the Students in Free Enterprise - considered helping the arabbers improve their business model as a student project. But ultimately, they decided against it. "[The students'] position and mine is that unfortunately this does not seem to be a viable business," Kucher says. Kucher says the key problem is the very element the arabbers love most: the horses. Their slow pace makes them an inefficient way to transport food (Link)."
There are several flaws with their thinking: Any business that has managed to survive onslaughts of stifling regulation and animal rights hysteria is surely a "viable" and resilient one. The privately-run profession would not have lasted as long as it did if it was supposedly so inefficient (On the other hand, some publicly-run programs are allowed to run on long after they become inefficient, wasteful, and ineffective). The point of arabbing is not to be "fast" and "efficient" (so typical of our tragic econometric mindset of making everything mechanistically "efficient" these days) but to instead provide a highly-visible service to residents - the advertising cries of the arabbers and their slow progression up and down the city's narrow residential streets makes it easy for residents to notice their presence and come out to buy produce at their own convenience. How many of these same residents would be as comfortable with buying produce out of the back of a mysterious person's van? Vans or trucks would be forced to make far fewer stops along potential arabbing routes - constantly stopping and starting a motor vehicle for the benefit of any potential customer along a residential street would waste tremendous amounts of (expensive) gas, thus arabbers would be forced to set up predetermined locations or "stops" to sell their goods, with a resulting reduction in their prominence and convenient service. It is far easier to do groceries from a moving market stall where the goods are immediately visible. This highly-visible presence of arabbers has not gone unnoticed by Baltimore kids who, unable to buy produce from corner convenience stores, flock to the arabbers for fresh fruit, especially in the summertime.
"Arabbing may look like some kind of living history encampment, but it works. Out in West Baltimore, there aren’t many supermarkets; the most popular vegetable in the corner store is the potato chip. Brooks says he sells out his wagon faster than ever before. On Saturdays, when he rolls into Southwest Baltimore and Pigtown, he never makes it up into Federal Hill. In a world of disinvestment—boarded-up houses, failing schools, disappearing stores—the arabbers have an eager market to tend; in its own ambling way, a horse and cart is a nimble distribution system for this territory. Arabbers reach the people who need it most: low-income families and the elderly, people with little access to healthy foods from now-distant supermarkets. In a time of $4-per-gallon gas, one has to wonder if non-polluting, doorstep food delivery is an idea whose time has come again. Keith Brooks’ father, James Brock, explains it this way: “With a truck you can go more places and do more,” he says. “But with a wagon you’re going to slow down and sell more. You catch the people walking down the street (Link)."
The presence of the arabbers also instills community spirit in neighborhoods which desperately need it:
"...What the stables provided for the impressionable young men was nevertheless evident. In a rustbelt city that was in the throes of epidemic violence, the stables were a place that instilled compassion and responsibility...(Richter, p79)."
"In areas of the city plagued by drugs and urban decay, arabbing represents a historical link to an era of more sound communities and to a strong entrepreneurial ethic. Reflecting on the diminished opportunities for arabbing, Dante, the son of arabber John Gladney said: "This is a simple lifestyle. My generation was misguided on how to survive. It was all big-screen TVs and gang [fights]. We lost reality within ourselves. But with arabbing, you can be your own boss, work your pace (Bullock)."
We can revive the arabbing profession without lapsing into the typical government strategy of subsidizing it to keep it alive. We must eliminate ALL regulations over the profession - absolutely all permits, licenses, fees, forms, processes, inspections, procedures, etc, for establishing vending businesses must be abolished. All regulations limiting the time, conditions, and places where arabbers (and other vendors) can operate need to be removed. All restrictions against building new stables must be removed. The ability of animal rights activists to interfere with the arabbing profession must be severely restricted. Only after such a "cleaning of house" will the profession have a chance to truly flourish - and without any need for mindless subsidies! With the removal of regulations, permitting/licensing, and threats from animal activists, arabbers could free up some of their time and energy to educate and promote the culture of arabbing to Baltimore's children, thereby helping to raise the next generation of potential arabbers.
The rise of food deserts in Baltimore
Like many other inner cities across the US, large swaths of Baltimore can be called "food deserts" since there is little access to fresh produce and other perishable foods. A recent study presented some depressing statistics on how difficult it is to find fresh food in some of Baltimore's more isolated neighborhoods.
As described in the Urbanite article several paragraphs above, the arabbers already do their part in bringing fresh produce to Baltimore's food deserts, but since their numbers are kept so artificially low, the potential effect of arabbers to mitigate against food deserts is limited. If they were freed from regulatory overhead, the arabbing profession could grow into a thriving enterprise adapted to meet the needs of a market that the chain supermarkets have ignored. Indeed, with increased competition coming from more and more arabbers selling superior-quality fresh foods, even the local corner stores might be induced into offering more fresh foods, all without having to resort to imposing mandates or regulations requiring them to provide fresh food. Rather than establishing subsidized services or groceries to specifically target food deserts (we can hardly afford to do so when government at all levels - municipal, state, and federal - is utterly broke), it would be far more feasible to allow the arabbing profession to expand to cover this potentially lucrative market. After all, according to the 2000 US census, more than 35% of Baltimore households don't have access to a car, so their continued patronage of Baltimore's arabbers is guaranteed. Rather than encouraging increased automobile ownership (a favorite strategy of conservative social workers) or increasing transit access (Admittedly Baltimore desperately needs an expansion of its public transit networks but it is financially infeasible to do that right now), arabbing can be a useful tool to further reduce dependence on the automobile for various tasks and chores (and help people save money which would otherwise be wasted on gas and the various expenses in maintaining a car) - the arabbing profession could even expand to sell other goods besides perishable foods (as it did in the past) to further reduce automobile trips. Baltimore is well positioned to benefit from such a strategy only because its residential building fabric is already very dense.
It should be pointed out, however, that access to fresh produce does not necessarily lead to improved diet and is not proven to improve social conditions, especially if poor lifestyle choices have become ingrained practice. Several studies, primarily from the UK (where the food desert problem has different characteristics) have suggested exactly that, though conflicting studies done in the US have suggested that the opposite may actually be true and that even though distinct social factors in British society may have made food deserts an overblown problem there, the problem is still a very serious one in the US.
History of Baltimore's Dollar Homes program
If we were to remove restrictions on arabbing and introduce new urban gardens and stables in the city, where would they go? The city of Baltimore owns 10,000 vacant properties (acquired via tax delinquency, eminent domain, etc) and even more properties lie fallow in the hands of private speculators. Baltimore should reinstate the wildly-successful "Dollar Homes" program it formed in the 1980s by selling off these vacant properties to interested citizens for $1.
The Dollar Homes program helped spark a considerable amount of revitalization in the city, but the offer of $1 houses had some very specific and practical strings attached - interested individuals needed to renovate the properties themselves and live in them outright - the city set up a loan program to assist people with renovations (no private banks would make such loans at the time) and ended up making a profit on the loans' interest. Likewise, in the selling off of city-owned vacant properties for stables and gardens/greenhouses, the city could introduce similar "strings" to control the outcome: Potential buyers could be required to immediately construct greenhouses/gardens on the properties (rather than sitting on the properties to flip them). Simple legislation could require buyers to dedicate a small but specific portion/percentage of their acquired vacant lots to the provision of arabber stables (obviously not every vacant lot would require a stable). The city could either retain the right to operate the stables on a for-profit basis itself (rent them out to arabbers) or it could implement an option that could allow private individuals to buy and run the stables as rental properties. Since the $1 properties would come with the attached string of requiring the immediate provision of greenhouses/gardens and stables, only individuals or organizations with an interest in urban agriculture would be attracted to the program - real estate speculators intending to sit on the land in hopes of it gaining value (and then reselling it) would simply have no opportunity to do so. After completing the gardening facilities, entrepreneurs could (1) make their own arrangements for growing food and sell the produce themselves (establish local "markets" of a sort), (2) wholesale their produce to arabbers, or (3) sell or rent plots/portions of facilities to local groups and individuals who would raise their own food (as is done in European allotment gardens). Of course, engaging in all three strategies concurrently is also a feasible option.
A comprehensive solution? Combining arabbers, stables, urban gardening, and homesteading into sustainable, adaptive distribution networks.
The strategies discussed above could foment the creation of an emergent, highly adaptive network of urban agriculture and distribution. Entrepreneurs would acquire cheap city land and, as long as they built the required gardening facilities and stables, they would be allowed to grow and distribute produce via any of the various profitable methods described above. Arabbers would continue to make their own arrangements for the feeding and care of their horses (or they could find eager young volunteers to do so), but with all fees, fines, and restrictions removed from the vending profession they would only pay a simple rent to shelter their horses. With the removal of all restrictions on where vending is allowed to take place, arabbers would have more flexibility in establishing new routes to sell produce along profitable densely-populated residential corridors. Alongside the $1 vacant-lot-to-urban-garden program, the city could reinstate the earlier Dollar Homes program to encourage even more people to renovate abandoned rowhouses and live in the city, further promoting neighborhood revitalization and ensuring the arrival of even more potential customers for the arabbers and gardening facilities.
One area where I would differ with the original Baltimore Infill Survey proposal is over the size and scale of the vertical farming operations proposed in the original idea. There should only be one simple standard in controlling the size of gardening facilities: the structures can be of any size as long as they do not pose unreasonable impediments to locals (blocking sunlight, access, movement, etc). Although various intelligent rationales for the feasibility of tall vertical farms have been made, I surmise that high-rise vertical farms are unlikely to become common in Baltimore and that more modest two to five story facilities are likely to become more prevalent: the pressure to build high rise facilities only exists in urban environments where land is very - sometime unrealistically - expensive (such as in Manhattan) and there is enough vacant land in Baltimore to diffuse the demand for extremely tall vertical farms. The construction of very tall vertical farms should NOT be forcibly induced if there is no demand for facilities of that scale.
Conclusion
Before the comprehensive strategy described above can be implemented, we must completely rethink the way we implement and carry out governmental regulations and the way we run government services. It is obvious that the arabbing profession's decline is substantially the fault of numerous regulations, but the concept of regulation is not at all "evil" in itself. Even in Baltimore the myriad regulations imposed on the arabbers were the result of well-meaning policymakers trying to satisfy the yammering of many clamoring, conflicting stakeholders, all of whom failed to predict the devastating effect their cumulative demands could have on the fiercely independent arabbing profession.
The manner in which we implement and maintain regulations in the US is incredibly lazy - the typical practice is to draft a set of regulations, fold them into common practice, and then forget about them, even when changing economic conditions might warrant a rethinking of those regulations. The devastating results of such lackluster, ineffective civil service practices are evident in many case studies: For example, many regulations were appropriately imposed on the American railroad industry when it gained monopolistic powers in the 19th century. After American railroads lost their monopoly powers to bus, auto, and air traffic in the 1950s, they were unable to respond, adapt, and compete to these new forms of transportation due to legacy regulatory requirements that weren't removed until the 1980 Staggers Act:
"Studies of the rail industry showed dramatic benefits for both railroads and their users from this alteration in the regulatory system. According to the Department of Transportation's Freight Management and Operations section's studies, railroad industry costs and prices were halved over a ten year period, the railroads reversed their historic loss of traffic (as measured by ton-miles) to the trucking industry, and railroad industry profits began to recover after decades of low profits and widespread railroad insolvencies."
A similar local scenario is cited (00:10:30) by James Howard Kunstler. He argues that the reason New York State has so many passenger rail delays is that many of the trunk lines (former New York Central lines which were often double or triple-tracked) have been reduced to single-track routes with the inevitable result of conflicts between freight and passenger trains. Many New York rail lines have been reduced to single-track routes because an ancient tax on railroad trackage (which is no longer necessary) is still in place and offers a formidable incentive against keeping second and third railroad tracks in service. In the 19th century, railroads in New York - at the height of their monopoly powers - could easily absorb the taxes on second and third tracks; the revenues from heavy passenger and freight traffic far outstripped tax liabilities on redundant trackage. Redundant trackage was built and maintained because it was vital in avoiding delays and conflicts between passenger and freight trains, but as soon as passenger and freight traffic dropped off precipitously in the postwar era those no-longer-needed redundant tracks were removed by the cash-strapped railroad companies to reduce their tax burdens. In other states without trackage taxes, redundant lines were left in place and continued to be utilized (far below their original capacity, of course) or they were left in a state of semi-abandonment. New York now faces the formidable task of rebuilding redundant trackage (at great cost) in its purported efforts to rebuild passenger rail travel - the whole situation could have been avoided with some careful legislative housecleaning and regulatory pruning.
To prevent outmoded and inflexible government regulations from stifling enterprises attempting to adapt to changing market conditions, legislation should be introduced to require ALL government regulations and programs to be reviewed and revised at least once a year. Time limits should be set on all regulations: any regulation would immediately expire after a set period - say four years - if it does not go through the yearly reviewing, revision, and updating process (this is to prevent legislators from renewing regulations by simply rubber-stamping them through an easy "extension" process). A process of mandatory expiration would allow for the easy elimination of outdated and arcane regulations that have been all-but-forgotten by legislators but still exert disincentives on private enterprise (such as the scenario discussed above). Any high-profile regulation deemed to be very important to the public good would therefore be forced to be continuously scrutinized and updated.
Besides reforming the manner in which we implement and update regulation, we also need to revisit our strategy for hiring employees to serve in publicly-run companies such as transit agencies, port authorities, public utilities, and the civil service. The best regulations and public programs are implemented by people who are intimately familiar with the environment they are hired to regulate or run. No comprehensive strategy currently exists in the public sector for hiring only people who have proven, comprehensive experience in the field they are applying for.
For example, most transit agencies in the US, upon embarking on a project to alter or expand service, divert lots of money to outside contractors to conduct "studies" and "evaluations" on expansion of service because the agency's employees have no clue how to implement and construct new transit systems themselves - they are merely overseers and managers, not practitioners and planners. The transit agency could simply hire employees who are actually familiar with transit in the affected region - relying on employees who ride transit every day, who have experience in building transit networks, and who understand the intricacies of expanding/altering service to the affected regions would allow the transit agency to implement expansion plans faster and more cheaply. When a public agency hires people who don't understand the field they are supposed to regulate or run, it is not surprising that outrageous abuse and incompetence are often the result.
Finally, public agencies are currently held hostage to ideological struggles and to the shifting pressures of constant political fluctuations, and they are often paralyzed by ineffectiveness as a result. This is quite contrary to the European system of civil service where remarkably-stable public institutions are given the freedom to do their work without bending to the periodic fluctuating demands of clashing political parties. It is doubtful that the US will ever reform its political structure so that our public agencies could work in a similarly effective and efficient manner. References
Go Fix It!
Solving the Urban 'Food Desert' Problem via Arabbing
Image by "Patapsco Jones" of changebaltimore.blogspot.com
Introduction
Baltimore's Office of Promotion and Arts recently hosted an online forum where interested citizens could submit proposals to solve the city's enormous "missing tooth" (vacant lots) problem. Some of the proposals were unfortunately quite specious, especially those which called for more "green space." However, one of the most intelligent proposals for the Baltimore Infill Survey was an elegant strategy to solve several of the city's problems at once: (1) How can we fill in Baltimore's missing teeth with useful and productive activities? (2) How can we solve Baltimore's daunting 'food desert' problem? and (3) How can we promote self-sustaining, local networks of distribution and commerce? The proposal above sought to solve these problems by filling missing teeth with locally-maintained vertical gardens and using the existing Baltimore network of arabbers to distribute the produce to neighborhoods all over town.
There are, however, obstacles to implementing this strategy. (1) The arabbing profession needs to be freed from the grips of burdensome regulation and animal rights hysteria, (2) the city needs to implement a new "Dollar Homes" program to encourage entrepreneurs to set up urban gardening outfits, (3) new stables need to be built and rented to interested arabbers in a transparent manner, and (4) the manner in which we implement and update government regulations needs to be rethought, not just in Baltimore but nation-wide. Below are descriptions of the obstacles to implementing the solution proposed above followed by a description of a comprehensive vision to implement the proposal if the obstacles can be overcome.
The decline of arabbing in Baltimore
"Arabbers" are merchants who use horse-pulled carts to sell produce, seafood, and various other foods to urban residents. In times past they also supplied ice, coal, wood, scrap metal, milk and other dairy products, etc, to residential neighborhoods. Before the advent of the automobile, many US cities contained horsecart merchants since they were a very convenient and reliable way to obtain fresh produce, especially in areas that were distant from grocery stores and wholesalers' food markets. Baltimore is the only city in the US where the arabbing profession still exists, but even in Baltimore the profession has been on the decline since WWII, and it has been flirting with extinction in the last few decades.
Some of the reasons behind the decline of the arabbing profession in Baltimore are obvious and not at all surprising: The rise of fast food restaurants, convenience stores, and large suburban supermarkets has led to a lifestyle where most households now tend to buy their groceries from large supermarkets on a weekly (or even monthly) basis rather than shopping at local grocery stores or public markets on a daily basis (as was common before WWII and is still common in Europe, Latin America, Asia, etc).
Baltimore still has busy port facilities and six public markets (Avenue Market, Lexington Market, Broadway Market, Cross Street Market, Northeast Market, and Hollins Market), which may explain why the arabbing profession has survived in Baltimore but has gone extinct elsewhere: it is still somewhat easy (but becoming perennially more difficult) for arabbers in Baltimore to obtain produce and other goods via wholesale at the public markets and docks and to resell the produce in residential neighborhoods that are isolated from those public markets or supermarkets. Despite the presence of wholesaling activities at the docks and public markets, large swaths of the city are still "food deserts" (discussed in greater detail in the next section).
Selling produce via horsecarts in an urban setting obviously requires shelter and facilities for the horses. In the past this was partially accomplished via public stables - just as contemporary cities provide automobile parking to commuters via public parking garages (and use parking fees to pay for the maintenance of the garages), so too did cities rent out stalls in public stables to individuals who needed a place to keep their horses. Many individuals who relied on the public stables did so because (1) they did not have enough space (land) to build their own private stables or (2) they could not afford to build, run, and maintain their own private stables.
Out of sheer necessity, Baltimore once had some 65 public stables (p79). This number had dwindled to some 50 stables by the 1940s, and by the 1990s they had dwindled to just three. One of the three stables (the Retreat Street stable) was recently condemned as well. The horses from Retreat Street were moved to temporary tent stables under a highway overpass on Monroe Street, and it was here that several cases of abuse/neglect emerged (not at all surprising considering the shoddy facilities the arabbers had to work with). Baltimore simply has not taken the organizational efficiency with which it operates public parking garages and applied that same strategy to the public stables: the city could have run the stables as for-profit shelters (rented horse stalls) to fund building maintenance - the practice of renting stable stalls lapsed after the number of public stables in the city declined to an insignificant amount. The city did not pay for horse feed and medical treatment until the recent accusations of neglect/abuse: Arabbers are appropriately expected to make their own provisions to feed and care for the horses, and in the past they often employed young volunteers to do those very tasks. Here it becomes obvious that a heavy, burdensome layer of well-meaning but misguided regulation has stifled the ease with which arabbers could once care for their horses:
"The city laws have changed. While young people used to be stable hands, they can't anymore. You have to be 18 or older to handle horses [My note: But you only have to be 16 to drive a car!?], you have to have a license, animal inspectors come in regularly to check the stables. It's not the same. Traditions are passed down generation to generation, but if young people can't handle horses, it's stopping them from joining the trade (Roland Freeman)."
Since the public stables have been allowed to decay, it is not surprising that - as arabbers have resorted to sheltering their horses in makeshift facilities - abuse and neglect would inevitably emerge and that the city, through sheer negligence, would be forced to pay close to $500,000 to remedy the deteriorating conditions it itself fostered. As the article in the above link pointed out, it would have been cheaper for the city to build new stables than to allow the situation to deteriorate and pay for the inevitable (and usually more expensive) cleanaup afterward - such is the inevitable outcome of deferred maintenance.
Besides the wanton neglect of stables and curtailing of youth volunteerism, the city has established numerous other regulations to control the arabbing profession. As in most other American cities, there is strong public pressure to remove slow moving objects (bikes, pedestrians, horses) from the roadways to make automobile travel as convenient and efficient as possible. As in any other city, Baltimore's planning and regulatory agencies are hostage to the hyperspecialized demands of traffic engineers and transportation planners who tend to be more interested in automobile efficiency (using more curb cuts, using wider curve ratios, and narrowing sidewalks to make automobile travel easier) than in intermodal transport (making street networks convenient and accessible to forms of transport other than the car). The city has restricted the locations where arabbers may hawk their products - the Inner Harbor and other large swaths of the city are off-limits. The city has also restricted the times of day that arabbers may operate - regulations require the horses to be back in their stables by dusk. Arabbers argue that this cuts them off from a lucrative business opportunity - many commuters, returning home after a long workday, could have a perfect opportunity to purchase groceries in their own neighborhoods right before dinner:
"Dorothy Johns says the vendors in her family are just breaking even these days. She hopes it will get better as the season progresses, and blames poor sales on city regulations that limit the hours the horses can be out on the street. The rules prohibit arabbers from operating when the weather is particularly hot or cold, and when there is snow, ice, or excessive rain. From the last Sunday in October through the first Sunday in April, the horses must be in by dusk. That is often before their customers are home from work, Jones says (Link)."
Burdensome regulation is not the only problem. Hysterical animal rights activists have also militated for the removal of the horses. As Scott Bullock describes so well:
"The decline of arabbing began in 1966 when the City made it virtually impossible to construct any new stables within its limits. Around the same time, government urban renewal projects closed some of the remaining stables as well as the City's wholesale produce market in the Inner Harbor, which made it much more difficult for arabbers to conveniently obtain their stock.
"The arabbing tradition struggled along, however, until the arabbers faced a larger and far more politically powerful adversary: animal-rights activists from the suburbs who are philosophically opposed to the use of horses for trade, especially in a city environment.
"To fight efforts that would heavily regulate and eventually prohibit arabbing, the Arabber Preservation Society (APS) was formed in January 1994. The Society - which had restored some older stables and raised funds to preserve arabbing - swung into action against Bill 753, which, among other things, would have sharply limited the number of arabber licenses issued each year. Most members of the community, while acknowledging problems with how the animals were cared for in some of the stables, recognized that arabbing is a vital entrepreneurial tradition worthy of preservation. Because of the efforts of APS and others, Bill 753 eventually went down in defeat.
"The regulations and harassment of the arabbers have taken their toll. Only about 40 arabber licenses are currently issued. Meanwhile, pressure from the animal-rights activists continues. According to Steven Blake, a carpenter by trade and president of APS, new regulations have been pending for more than a year. The regulations, pushed by the animal-rights activists, would not need City Council approval and instead could be implemented by the City's Health Commissioner. Among other things, the regulations would establish a detailed and stringent temperature/humidity index that would curtail the ability of arabbers to work. For instance, according to Blake, the temperature could be 75 degrees with light rain (but high humidity), and the horses could not be taken out.
"The racial dimensions to this struggle have not been lost on the community - especially the arabbers. While almost all of the arabbers are older, African-American men from the inner-city trying to eke out a living, the animal-rights activists are uniformly well-educated, white suburbanites on an ideological crusade. Moreover, what the activists ignore is that the arabbers themselves are "horse-crazy" and often choose arabbing as an occupation or do it in their spare time so that they can be around horses.
"For the grand tradition of arabbing to be preserved, regulations that go beyond reasonably protecting the safety of the horses must be defeated. Indeed, the City should encourage the expansion of this dynamic remnant of Baltimore's splendid history of neighborhood enterprise. Unlike most historic preservation efforts, the arabbers do not rely on government subsidies or regulation to preserve their tradition. Rather, the arabbers only ask that the government limit its role to reasonable regulation of the horses and stables and allow them to continue in the occupation many of them learned from their fathers or grandfathers (Bullock)."
The militant and obsessive animal rights activists (they seem to care so much for the welfare of a few horses but they ignore inner city children who suffer from the same neglect, abuse, malnourishment, etc - which comes first - people or horses?) explicitly told the New York Times and the Baltimore City Paper that their ultimate goal is to eradicate the arabbing profession at all costs:
"Animal welfare advocates have been trying to get the arabbers off the streets for years. In 1995, a year after several horses froze to death, an animal rights activist told The New York Times: "The only thing we're willing to negotiate is when will they go out of business - five years, four years?"... Van Allen says HSUS [the Humane Society of the United States] has "an agenda to get horses off city streets." HSUS' Stacy Segal acknowledges that is essentially true. "In this day and age, we believe that horses do not belong on city streets," she says. [My note: Why doesn't she then militate against horses pulling visitors around in the touristy parts of town?] But, she contends, in working with the city of Baltimore, HSUS was simply looking for "certain standards of care." "We're definitely not on a mission to get rid of the arabbers," she says (Link)."
As described in the excerpts above, Baltimore is suffering from a scenario where outsiders are trying to control what the city's residents can do with their horses. While certain standards of care are certainly necessary in order to avoid willful cruelty to animals, any attempt to dictate what people can and cannot do with their horses (the HSUS implies that horses are just fine for rural/suburban recreation but that they should not be used for urban labor) is outrageous and must be fought. Furthermore, although it may sound odd to suggest it now, it might be possible that, just as we will need to become more reliant on renewable energy systems in the future, so too might we once again need to increase our reliance on extensive animal (and human) labor, especially if we don't get our act together on renewable energy resources and we are shoehorned into a scenario where we have put off renewable energy for so long that it is "too late" and we are forced to return to animal labor/transport when oil becomes scarce. If such a scenario occurs, urbanist James Howard Kunstler argues that a certain amount of both willful cruelty and unintended negligence of animals is to be expected (00:07:10), as such abuse was very common before the automobile era.
Individuals who oppose the use of horses for arabbing have asked why the tradition needs to be preserved - wouldn't it be easier to give arabbers trucks and vans to distribute their produce? Indeed a group led Jim Kucher of the University of Baltimore came to the conclusion that the arabbing profession was inefficient because the horses were "too slow":
"Late last year, Jim Kucher, executive director of Entrepreneurship Programs at the University of Baltimore, and a group of his students - a chapter of the Students in Free Enterprise - considered helping the arabbers improve their business model as a student project. But ultimately, they decided against it. "[The students'] position and mine is that unfortunately this does not seem to be a viable business," Kucher says. Kucher says the key problem is the very element the arabbers love most: the horses. Their slow pace makes them an inefficient way to transport food (Link)."
There are several flaws with their thinking: Any business that has managed to survive onslaughts of stifling regulation and animal rights hysteria is surely a "viable" and resilient one. The privately-run profession would not have lasted as long as it did if it was supposedly so inefficient (On the other hand, some publicly-run programs are allowed to run on long after they become inefficient, wasteful, and ineffective). The point of arabbing is not to be "fast" and "efficient" (so typical of our tragic econometric mindset of making everything mechanistically "efficient" these days) but to instead provide a highly-visible service to residents - the advertising cries of the arabbers and their slow progression up and down the city's narrow residential streets makes it easy for residents to notice their presence and come out to buy produce at their own convenience. How many of these same residents would be as comfortable with buying produce out of the back of a mysterious person's van? Vans or trucks would be forced to make far fewer stops along potential arabbing routes - constantly stopping and starting a motor vehicle for the benefit of any potential customer along a residential street would waste tremendous amounts of (expensive) gas, thus arabbers would be forced to set up predetermined locations or "stops" to sell their goods, with a resulting reduction in their prominence and convenient service. It is far easier to do groceries from a moving market stall where the goods are immediately visible. This highly-visible presence of arabbers has not gone unnoticed by Baltimore kids who, unable to buy produce from corner convenience stores, flock to the arabbers for fresh fruit, especially in the summertime.
"Arabbing may look like some kind of living history encampment, but it works. Out in West Baltimore, there aren’t many supermarkets; the most popular vegetable in the corner store is the potato chip. Brooks says he sells out his wagon faster than ever before. On Saturdays, when he rolls into Southwest Baltimore and Pigtown, he never makes it up into Federal Hill. In a world of disinvestment—boarded-up houses, failing schools, disappearing stores—the arabbers have an eager market to tend; in its own ambling way, a horse and cart is a nimble distribution system for this territory. Arabbers reach the people who need it most: low-income families and the elderly, people with little access to healthy foods from now-distant supermarkets. In a time of $4-per-gallon gas, one has to wonder if non-polluting, doorstep food delivery is an idea whose time has come again. Keith Brooks’ father, James Brock, explains it this way: “With a truck you can go more places and do more,” he says. “But with a wagon you’re going to slow down and sell more. You catch the people walking down the street (Link)."
The presence of the arabbers also instills community spirit in neighborhoods which desperately need it:
"...What the stables provided for the impressionable young men was nevertheless evident. In a rustbelt city that was in the throes of epidemic violence, the stables were a place that instilled compassion and responsibility...(Richter, p79)."
"In areas of the city plagued by drugs and urban decay, arabbing represents a historical link to an era of more sound communities and to a strong entrepreneurial ethic. Reflecting on the diminished opportunities for arabbing, Dante, the son of arabber John Gladney said: "This is a simple lifestyle. My generation was misguided on how to survive. It was all big-screen TVs and gang [fights]. We lost reality within ourselves. But with arabbing, you can be your own boss, work your pace (Bullock)."
We can revive the arabbing profession without lapsing into the typical government strategy of subsidizing it to keep it alive. We must eliminate ALL regulations over the profession - absolutely all permits, licenses, fees, forms, processes, inspections, procedures, etc, for establishing vending businesses must be abolished. All regulations limiting the time, conditions, and places where arabbers (and other vendors) can operate need to be removed. All restrictions against building new stables must be removed. The ability of animal rights activists to interfere with the arabbing profession must be severely restricted. Only after such a "cleaning of house" will the profession have a chance to truly flourish - and without any need for mindless subsidies! With the removal of regulations, permitting/licensing, and threats from animal activists, arabbers could free up some of their time and energy to educate and promote the culture of arabbing to Baltimore's children, thereby helping to raise the next generation of potential arabbers.
The rise of food deserts in Baltimore
Like many other inner cities across the US, large swaths of Baltimore can be called "food deserts" since there is little access to fresh produce and other perishable foods. A recent study presented some depressing statistics on how difficult it is to find fresh food in some of Baltimore's more isolated neighborhoods.
As described in the Urbanite article several paragraphs above, the arabbers already do their part in bringing fresh produce to Baltimore's food deserts, but since their numbers are kept so artificially low, the potential effect of arabbers to mitigate against food deserts is limited. If they were freed from regulatory overhead, the arabbing profession could grow into a thriving enterprise adapted to meet the needs of a market that the chain supermarkets have ignored. Indeed, with increased competition coming from more and more arabbers selling superior-quality fresh foods, even the local corner stores might be induced into offering more fresh foods, all without having to resort to imposing mandates or regulations requiring them to provide fresh food. Rather than establishing subsidized services or groceries to specifically target food deserts (we can hardly afford to do so when government at all levels - municipal, state, and federal - is utterly broke), it would be far more feasible to allow the arabbing profession to expand to cover this potentially lucrative market. After all, according to the 2000 US census, more than 35% of Baltimore households don't have access to a car, so their continued patronage of Baltimore's arabbers is guaranteed. Rather than encouraging increased automobile ownership (a favorite strategy of conservative social workers) or increasing transit access (Admittedly Baltimore desperately needs an expansion of its public transit networks but it is financially infeasible to do that right now), arabbing can be a useful tool to further reduce dependence on the automobile for various tasks and chores (and help people save money which would otherwise be wasted on gas and the various expenses in maintaining a car) - the arabbing profession could even expand to sell other goods besides perishable foods (as it did in the past) to further reduce automobile trips. Baltimore is well positioned to benefit from such a strategy only because its residential building fabric is already very dense.
It should be pointed out, however, that access to fresh produce does not necessarily lead to improved diet and is not proven to improve social conditions, especially if poor lifestyle choices have become ingrained practice. Several studies, primarily from the UK (where the food desert problem has different characteristics) have suggested exactly that, though conflicting studies done in the US have suggested that the opposite may actually be true and that even though distinct social factors in British society may have made food deserts an overblown problem there, the problem is still a very serious one in the US.
History of Baltimore's Dollar Homes program
If we were to remove restrictions on arabbing and introduce new urban gardens and stables in the city, where would they go? The city of Baltimore owns 10,000 vacant properties (acquired via tax delinquency, eminent domain, etc) and even more properties lie fallow in the hands of private speculators. Baltimore should reinstate the wildly-successful "Dollar Homes" program it formed in the 1980s by selling off these vacant properties to interested citizens for $1.
The Dollar Homes program helped spark a considerable amount of revitalization in the city, but the offer of $1 houses had some very specific and practical strings attached - interested individuals needed to renovate the properties themselves and live in them outright - the city set up a loan program to assist people with renovations (no private banks would make such loans at the time) and ended up making a profit on the loans' interest. Likewise, in the selling off of city-owned vacant properties for stables and gardens/greenhouses, the city could introduce similar "strings" to control the outcome: Potential buyers could be required to immediately construct greenhouses/gardens on the properties (rather than sitting on the properties to flip them). Simple legislation could require buyers to dedicate a small but specific portion/percentage of their acquired vacant lots to the provision of arabber stables (obviously not every vacant lot would require a stable). The city could either retain the right to operate the stables on a for-profit basis itself (rent them out to arabbers) or it could implement an option that could allow private individuals to buy and run the stables as rental properties. Since the $1 properties would come with the attached string of requiring the immediate provision of greenhouses/gardens and stables, only individuals or organizations with an interest in urban agriculture would be attracted to the program - real estate speculators intending to sit on the land in hopes of it gaining value (and then reselling it) would simply have no opportunity to do so. After completing the gardening facilities, entrepreneurs could (1) make their own arrangements for growing food and sell the produce themselves (establish local "markets" of a sort), (2) wholesale their produce to arabbers, or (3) sell or rent plots/portions of facilities to local groups and individuals who would raise their own food (as is done in European allotment gardens). Of course, engaging in all three strategies concurrently is also a feasible option.
A comprehensive solution? Combining arabbers, stables, urban gardening, and homesteading into sustainable, adaptive distribution networks.
The strategies discussed above could foment the creation of an emergent, highly adaptive network of urban agriculture and distribution. Entrepreneurs would acquire cheap city land and, as long as they built the required gardening facilities and stables, they would be allowed to grow and distribute produce via any of the various profitable methods described above. Arabbers would continue to make their own arrangements for the feeding and care of their horses (or they could find eager young volunteers to do so), but with all fees, fines, and restrictions removed from the vending profession they would only pay a simple rent to shelter their horses. With the removal of all restrictions on where vending is allowed to take place, arabbers would have more flexibility in establishing new routes to sell produce along profitable densely-populated residential corridors. Alongside the $1 vacant-lot-to-urban-garden program, the city could reinstate the earlier Dollar Homes program to encourage even more people to renovate abandoned rowhouses and live in the city, further promoting neighborhood revitalization and ensuring the arrival of even more potential customers for the arabbers and gardening facilities.
One area where I would differ with the original Baltimore Infill Survey proposal is over the size and scale of the vertical farming operations proposed in the original idea. There should only be one simple standard in controlling the size of gardening facilities: the structures can be of any size as long as they do not pose unreasonable impediments to locals (blocking sunlight, access, movement, etc). Although various intelligent rationales for the feasibility of tall vertical farms have been made, I surmise that high-rise vertical farms are unlikely to become common in Baltimore and that more modest two to five story facilities are likely to become more prevalent: the pressure to build high rise facilities only exists in urban environments where land is very - sometime unrealistically - expensive (such as in Manhattan) and there is enough vacant land in Baltimore to diffuse the demand for extremely tall vertical farms. The construction of very tall vertical farms should NOT be forcibly induced if there is no demand for facilities of that scale.
Conclusion
Before the comprehensive strategy described above can be implemented, we must completely rethink the way we implement and carry out governmental regulations and the way we run government services. It is obvious that the arabbing profession's decline is substantially the fault of numerous regulations, but the concept of regulation is not at all "evil" in itself. Even in Baltimore the myriad regulations imposed on the arabbers were the result of well-meaning policymakers trying to satisfy the yammering of many clamoring, conflicting stakeholders, all of whom failed to predict the devastating effect their cumulative demands could have on the fiercely independent arabbing profession.
The manner in which we implement and maintain regulations in the US is incredibly lazy - the typical practice is to draft a set of regulations, fold them into common practice, and then forget about them, even when changing economic conditions might warrant a rethinking of those regulations. The devastating results of such lackluster, ineffective civil service practices are evident in many case studies: For example, many regulations were appropriately imposed on the American railroad industry when it gained monopolistic powers in the 19th century. After American railroads lost their monopoly powers to bus, auto, and air traffic in the 1950s, they were unable to respond, adapt, and compete to these new forms of transportation due to legacy regulatory requirements that weren't removed until the 1980 Staggers Act:
"Studies of the rail industry showed dramatic benefits for both railroads and their users from this alteration in the regulatory system. According to the Department of Transportation's Freight Management and Operations section's studies, railroad industry costs and prices were halved over a ten year period, the railroads reversed their historic loss of traffic (as measured by ton-miles) to the trucking industry, and railroad industry profits began to recover after decades of low profits and widespread railroad insolvencies."
A similar local scenario is cited (00:10:30) by James Howard Kunstler. He argues that the reason New York State has so many passenger rail delays is that many of the trunk lines (former New York Central lines which were often double or triple-tracked) have been reduced to single-track routes with the inevitable result of conflicts between freight and passenger trains. Many New York rail lines have been reduced to single-track routes because an ancient tax on railroad trackage (which is no longer necessary) is still in place and offers a formidable incentive against keeping second and third railroad tracks in service. In the 19th century, railroads in New York - at the height of their monopoly powers - could easily absorb the taxes on second and third tracks; the revenues from heavy passenger and freight traffic far outstripped tax liabilities on redundant trackage. Redundant trackage was built and maintained because it was vital in avoiding delays and conflicts between passenger and freight trains, but as soon as passenger and freight traffic dropped off precipitously in the postwar era those no-longer-needed redundant tracks were removed by the cash-strapped railroad companies to reduce their tax burdens. In other states without trackage taxes, redundant lines were left in place and continued to be utilized (far below their original capacity, of course) or they were left in a state of semi-abandonment. New York now faces the formidable task of rebuilding redundant trackage (at great cost) in its purported efforts to rebuild passenger rail travel - the whole situation could have been avoided with some careful legislative housecleaning and regulatory pruning.
To prevent outmoded and inflexible government regulations from stifling enterprises attempting to adapt to changing market conditions, legislation should be introduced to require ALL government regulations and programs to be reviewed and revised at least once a year. Time limits should be set on all regulations: any regulation would immediately expire after a set period - say four years - if it does not go through the yearly reviewing, revision, and updating process (this is to prevent legislators from renewing regulations by simply rubber-stamping them through an easy "extension" process). A process of mandatory expiration would allow for the easy elimination of outdated and arcane regulations that have been all-but-forgotten by legislators but still exert disincentives on private enterprise (such as the scenario discussed above). Any high-profile regulation deemed to be very important to the public good would therefore be forced to be continuously scrutinized and updated.
Besides reforming the manner in which we implement and update regulation, we also need to revisit our strategy for hiring employees to serve in publicly-run companies such as transit agencies, port authorities, public utilities, and the civil service. The best regulations and public programs are implemented by people who are intimately familiar with the environment they are hired to regulate or run. No comprehensive strategy currently exists in the public sector for hiring only people who have proven, comprehensive experience in the field they are applying for.
For example, most transit agencies in the US, upon embarking on a project to alter or expand service, divert lots of money to outside contractors to conduct "studies" and "evaluations" on expansion of service because the agency's employees have no clue how to implement and construct new transit systems themselves - they are merely overseers and managers, not practitioners and planners. The transit agency could simply hire employees who are actually familiar with transit in the affected region - relying on employees who ride transit every day, who have experience in building transit networks, and who understand the intricacies of expanding/altering service to the affected regions would allow the transit agency to implement expansion plans faster and more cheaply. When a public agency hires people who don't understand the field they are supposed to regulate or run, it is not surprising that outrageous abuse and incompetence are often the result.
Finally, public agencies are currently held hostage to ideological struggles and to the shifting pressures of constant political fluctuations, and they are often paralyzed by ineffectiveness as a result. This is quite contrary to the European system of civil service where remarkably-stable public institutions are given the freedom to do their work without bending to the periodic fluctuating demands of clashing political parties. It is doubtful that the US will ever reform its political structure so that our public agencies could work in a similarly effective and efficient manner.
References
- The Arabber Preservation Society, Baltimore MD.
Appleton, Andrea.- For Want of a Horse: Will This Generation of Arabbers Be Baltimore's Last? Baltimore City Paper: April 28, 2010..
Baltimore City's Past, Present, and Future Blog.- Whatever Happened to the Dollar Row House? July 19, 2009.
Brewington, Kelly.- Arabbers, Their Horses Reunited. Baltimore Sun: August 15, 2007.
Bullock, Scott G.- Baltimore: No Harbor for Entrepreneurs. Washington DC: Institute for Justice, 1997. (Alternate PDF link).
Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future.- Food Deserts in Baltimore.
Cohen, Charles.- Year of the Horse. Urbanite Magazine: Issue 39, July 2009.
Crary, Duncan, and James Howard Kunstler.- Contracting Cities and Urban Chickens. KunstlerCast #64: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. May 14, 2009.
- Food in a World Made By Hand. KunstlerCast #82: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. October 1, 2009.
- Meaningful Work in a New Economy. KunstlerCast #55: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. March 12, 2009. 00:07:10.
- Water Transit. KunstlerCast #39: The Tragic Comedy of Suburban Sprawl. November 20, 2008.
Cummins, Steven, and Sally Macintyre.- Food Environments and Obesity: Neighborhood or Nation? International Journal of Epidemiology: Vol. 35, No. 1, 2006 (pp 100-104).
Despommier, Dickson, et al.- Vertical Farming. Encyclopedia of Earth: February 14, 2007.
Dodson, Jennifer, et al.- Formative Research for a Healthy Diet Intervention Among Inner-City Adolescents: The Importance of Family, School, and Neighborhood Environment. Ecology of Food and Nutrition: Vol. 48, Issue 1, January 2009 (pp 39-58).
Finn, Catherine.- The Wanderers' Songs: The Last of Baltimore's Arabbers Are Fading Away. National Trust for Historic Preservation: November 2, 1997.
Gallagher, Mari.- Baltimore Community Study Reveals All-Too-Common Effects of Food Deserts. Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future: September 29, 2009.
Goodman, Stephen.- History of the Dollar Home in Baltimore. Baltimore Housing Overstock Blog: April 29, 2009.
Gray, Steven.- Can America's Urban Food Deserts Bloom? Time Magazine: May 26, 2009.
Hansen, Christine.- Arabbers: An Endangered Species. BaltimoreStories.com.
Hinds, Michael Decourcy.- Baltimore's Story of City Homesteading. New York Times: January 16, 1986.
Hopkins, Jamie Smith.- Q&A: Dollar Homes. Baltimore Sun: April 28, 2009.
Kecken, Joy and Scott.- We Are Arabbers. The Film Foundry, 2004.
Laska, Melissa Nelson, et al.- Healthy Food Availability in Small Urban Food Stores: A Comparison of Four US Cities. Public Health Nutrition: Cambridge University Press, December 8, 2009.
Owens, Donna Marie.- Check It Out: Get Your Groceries at the Library. National Public Radio: April 26, 2010.
Pearson, Tim, et al.- Do Food Deserts Influence Fruit and Vegetable Consumption: A Cross-Sectional Study. Appetite: Vol. 45, Issue 2, October 2005 (pp 195-197).
Pothukuchi, Kameshwari, et al.- Attracting Supermarkets to Inner City Neighborhoods: Economic Development Outside the Box. Economic Development Quarterly: Vol. 19, No. 3, 2005 (pp 232-244).
Rodricks, Dan.- Last Chance for Baltimore's A-rabs. Baltimore Sun: April 4, 2010.
Schwartz, Robin.- Arabber Stables. Robinschwartz.net.
- Arabbers: Retreat Street. The FADER: Issue 41, October/November 2006 (pp 140-147).
Watts, D.C.H., et al.- Making Reconnections in Agro-Food Geography: Alternative Systems of Food Provision. Progress in Human Geography: Vol. 29, No. 1, 2005 (pp 22-40).
Wrigley, Neil, et al.< Back to my portfolio